Watch Out With Microstock

Read terms carefully or you may end up like this:

https://petapixel.com/2018/12/22/photog-shocked-after-his-1-88-stock-photo-shows-up-on-walmart-goods/

Joe

A good warning-I have no sympathy for him.

What, exactly, did he think microstock was? People buy pix for almost nothing, and they can use them in any way they want, for as long as they want. That's what royalty free is.

If he wanted to make extra money with stock, without having the photos available as royalty free, he should have gone through a traditional stock agency.

Since you are paid so little, you need a lot of sales by having a ton of pictures on several microstock sites. One site lists their top contributor as having over 500,000 images uploaded, while another site has a contributor with over 1,000,000 uploaded images. Imagine the time it takes to create a title, description and keywords for that many images. All of that to earn about $0.35 per sale.

Have Fun,
Jeff

Even magazines use photos from microstock sites, its way cheaper than paying a photographer directly. I was once paid $100 for one Snowy Owl image by Birders World Magazine (now know as BirdWatching Magazine) for a one time use in a mgiration and satellite tracking article. Since then nothing, it looks like from reading the magazine that most or alot of their images come from stock sites due to it being much cheaper for them.